Last week, the irritatingly bureaucratic European Union Commission issued a surprisingly sensible new compromise regulation calling for methane limits on natural gas imports but allowing companies to comply by gaining certification through accredited third-party validators. Since fugitive emissions of methane represents both economically inefficient product waste and a potential climate change Achilles’ heel for the gas industry, the EU’s approach provides natural gas producers a simple way to save gas and achieve deep cuts in methane emissions, which are a major cause of global warming.
In fact, as limiting methane increasingly becomes the sin qua non of near-term global temperature reductions and limiting extreme weather disasters, other gas importing nations like Japan and South Korea will likely follow the EU’s lead. This means that low methane “differentiated gas” will become a more valued product on the global market and more methane will be reduced.
To realize the significant economic and environmental advance the new EU regulations represent, it is worth examining how we got here. As recently as five years ago, Europe was morbidly dependent on Vladimir Putin’s regime for nearly half of its gas imports.
This unfortunate practice had three massive drawbacks. First, European imports provided the Kremlin huge cash reserves, which they often used to expand their military and espionage malfeasance. Second, Putin repeatedly leveraged his stranglehold on Europe gas supply to achieve a wide variety of nefarious policy goals, including the weakening democracy and economic independence in Eastern Europe. Finally, Russian gas has notoriously high fugitive emissions of methane from the ramshackle Gazprom system, meaning the EU was importing gas that was worse than coal from a climate perspective, since methane has 80 times the warming potency of carbon dioxide emissions.
Despite these profoundly negative consequences, it took Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to wake up Europe and begin the EU’s break from Kremlin gas. As Russia’s illegal war on Ukraine has dragged on, the EU finally issued in 2025 a phased-in full ban on the importation of gas from Russia completely by 2027, a tremendous policy achievement that will yield Europe substantial military, foreign-policy, and environmental benefits for decades to come.
Expanded imports of liquefied natural gas from the U.S. have been crucial in allowing Europe to break free from Russian gas. Indeed, US LNG exports to Europe have tripled just since the beginning of the since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and now provide nearly 60% of the EU’s LNG imports. U.S. gas has delivered America’s European allies a reliable gas supply critical to maintaining political and consumer support for Ukraine in key EU nations, while providing Brussels a far freer hand to take on Russian aggression.
But as climate activists were quick to point out, trading one high methane-emitting gas supplier for another was of no climate benefit, and could yield higher global emissions by increasing volume. Fortunately, domestic momentum had already been mounting in the U.S. among producers to limit the wasteful practice of allowing fugitive the emissions of methane.
As companies began to limit emissions and pledge even deeper cuts, many major US gas producers even opposed the Trump Administration’s attempts to undermine domestic regulations of methane emissions. Companies recognized the serious climate and reputational costs of methane emissions and began to realize that their engineers could ratchet down fugitive emissions and in the process provide a relatively inexpensive climate advance.
While the new EU rules begin to take affect January 1 2027, key requirements are only phased in over a number of years. Crucially, the revised EU regulations do not require “physical tracing of molecules, deliveries or cargoes” which in a US gas system with thousands of suppliers would be essentially impossible. Instead, the EU allows both “trace and claim” procedures along with “certification” compliance by accredited third-party validators to analyze the fugitive emissions of methane by companies and show they are complying with the strict EU standard.
These methods are specifically intended to make compliance easier for the U.S. industry without weakening long-term emissions requirements. Methane emission-certifying companies already analyze and measure more than 20% of US gas production, so the capacity to expand exists, especially as new validating companies develop and grow to meet the market.
In addition, the EU Commission rules now suspend penalty assessments for noncompliance of the rules for three years, allowing company’s time to accurately determine their emissions. Since cutting fugitive emissions of natural gas increases salable product, tightening leaky production and transportation systems can be accomplished relatively low cost. In fact, cutting methane leaks in half from oil and gas production can be achieved at no net additional cost according to the International Energy Agency and other analysts.
While some in the industry have objected to the new rules, the details suggest less immediate impact. A binding maximum methane intensity threshold amount (not yet named, but perhaps about .25%) takes effect for applicable new and renewed supply contracts only in 2030. And the EU new rules generally apply only to contracts signed after August 2024, so just 4% of current consumption would be subjected to the regulation by 2027, but eventually all imported gas will be covered.
Still, in time the rules will have a major impact in cutting methane emissions globally, with an EU standard of 0.2% methane intensity calculated to reduce emissions by more than 3 million tons of methane annually from EU imports alone. Adding wider adoption by six other major importers could cut global methane emissions by over 10 million tons a year.
Some regions of US gas producers already have achieved low methane production. The Marcellus and related fields primarily in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, have extremely low methane emissions, made even lower by commitments of companies in the region to achieve near net-zero methane emissions this decade.
The Permian basin of Texas and New Mexico generally has much higher emissions of methane but the region has seen as recent drop in methane according to an S&P report. A number of major companies in the Permian are making large reductions themselves as they anticipate import regulations.
No doubt some in both the gas industry and among climate activists will continue to object to the new rules. But analysis by the respected Rystad Energy finds the rules will not adversely impact EU energy security. Equally, recent data from Climate Analytics show that over the next few years the rules and hoped for expansion to other importing nations will bring about large new methane abatement, as much as 10 million tons a year, or nearly one-third of the total methane from gas globally.
Paul Bledsoe is President of Bledsoe & Associates, an energy and economic policy consultancy. He served as a staff member on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, as an official at the U.S. Interior Department, and as Communication Director of the White House Climate Change Task Force under President Bill Clinton.